Thursday, January 05, 2012

The Power of Food One of my strongest beliefs about food appears in my quote on the right hand side of this page.

" Health, excellent or ill, is passed to our children not just through our genes but primarily through our recipes".

People often live in fear of getting a disease that their parents have. I know so many people who had one or more parents die from a heart attack, or some other disease, and they are unconsciously waiting for the same thing to happen to them. You don't have to do that. You can take control of your destiny and fight back with a healthful diet. Most of the illnesses you fear that your parents are passing to you (and the ones their parents gave to them) were passed in the form of dietary traditions. If you ever get a heart attack, it could be from Mom's 3 meat stromboli recipe that gave you high cholesterol and not from the bad genes you inherited.

But What If It is the Genes? OK, I admit, it's not always the stromboli recipe. We occasionally inherit bad genes that give us a predisposition toward certain illnesses. But with proper diet, even the effects of bad genes can be mitigated. Perhaps one of the most exciting studies published last year was one led by researchers at McMaster and McGill universities. In a large gene-diet interaction study involving 27,000 individuals composed of European, South Asian, Chinese, Latin American and Arab ethnicities, they demonstrated that a diet rich in raw fruits, berries and vegetables could actually alter a high risk gene that causes heart attacks. Those participants with the high risk gene for myocardial infarction (the 9p21 genetic variant) who ate a prudent diet that included large amounts of raw fruits, berries and vegetables had a similar low risk of heart attack as those who did not have the gene! Dr. Jamie Engert, one of the lead researchers in the study, stated, "We know that 9p21 genetic variants increase the risk of heart disease for those who carry it... But it was a surprise to find that a healthy diet could significantly weaken its effect". Check out the complete paper, The Effect of Chromosome 9p21 Variants on Cardiovascular Disease May Be Modified by Dietary Intake:Evidence from a Case/Control and a Prospective Study.

So whether your parents have passed down bad genes or just unhealthful eating habits, make a point this year of eating a healthful plant-based diet with lots of raw fruits and vegetables.